It's good to see people are still checking in on occasion. I'm sorry I didn't have the comments working initially: there was a StupidBug™ in the system which should be fixed now. (I'm going to add a comment form soon from which people can email me about bugs, or other issues in general.)
While the bigger article on roleplaying is coming, I want to talk a little bit about in character and out of character, or IC and OOC. These are terms that come from the MUCK world, distinguishing whether dialogue and action are coming from the character or the player. FurryMUCK has never had any rules about IC-ness, but it's clearly a role-playing environment. I don't mean this in the way "World of Warcraft" is, that is, with character attributes and experience levels and concrete goals and all that; I mean, simply, that you're playing a character in a virtual world, and even if you play that character as "a furry version of me," the character is not you, and the experience is not the same as IRC or IM. Character-to-character is not person-to-person.
Nonetheless, the IC:OOC ratio on FurryMUCK has progressively shifted more OOC over the years. In many parts of the MUCK the rooms really are essentially IRC channels, with little more than token nods to the setting and characters. I make no bones about preferring IC to OOC for MUCKs; some people seem to think it's odd to want to interact with characters rather than players, but that's setting up a false dichotomy. My player may still want to talk to your player, but role-playing is fun. It's a different context. And I think role-playing works best when those contexts are fairly clearly defined. This is why the Club rules start out as follows:
The Giants' Club is a roleplaying area. This means it's IC-only. We have an OOC command (
look oocfor help) for the occasional comment, but abusing this is going to get you kicked, and the staff has final determination over what is and isn't IC. Not to put too fine a point on it, but "no-OOC" is one of the two Rules I Take Very Seriously, and staff will be bastards about the OOC rule. There are many, many places on FurryMUCK where OOC is just fine (or even expected); let us roleplayers have a few where it isn't.
"But why make a big deal about this?" you might ask. "You can roleplay when others are having an OOC conversation." In theory that's absolutely true; in practice, it rarely works. This is very much akin to a discussion board with a half-dozen people trying to have a serious conversation and two people making fart jokes. The people having the serious conversation can just ask the people making fart jokes to stop--they won't, and if they keep being challenged they'll insist on their God-given right to keep making fart jokes. They can try to ignore them, but the signal-to-noise ratio of the conversation is seriously degraded. Unless someone with the power to boot the guys making fart jokes off the board actually does boot them, the guys trying to have the real conversations eventually give up and go somewhere else, leaving the board to the guys making the fart jokes.
OOC conversation in an IC room isn't (usually) intended to disrupt, so you might think that's not a fair comparison. But in my experience the effect is exactly the same. When a little OOC chatter becames an actual OOC conversation, anyone trying to roleplay is faced with three choices: try to ignore it and face the signal-to-noise problem I mentioned above, give up trying to be IC and join in the OOC chatter, or leave. Or they can say something. I've had characters people don't know I play in the Giants' Club on occasion, watched OOC conversation take over the room, and seen people point out that what's going on violates the spirit of the area that theoretically everybody agreed to. And invariably, they catch shit for it.
Frankly, I don't like that. And I'm tired of the "how do you know I'm not really being IC? huh? huh?" response people sometimes try when they're called on it. Right, your spacefaring cybernetic vixen is entirely in character when she says, "Went over to SlobberFox's last night to watch an 'Iron Man' torrent and play 'Rock Band,' dude." How silly of me.
I'm not going to mince words here. If you are on FurryMUCK and go to the Giants' Club there, you agreed to the rules and as far as I'm concerned, you gave me your word you would try to follow them. If you think it's unreasonable and arrogant and just plain nasty of me to expect you to keep your word, I think I'm just going to live with it.
(I was going to write "unreasonable and cliquish" as an acerbic inside joke, but thoughts about "cliquishness" are for another blog post in the future.)